Have we discovered the Higgs? Even before Tuesday’s announcement at CERN, the
official word from Director Rolf Heuer was “no”.

Neither of the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider has crossed the magic “5-sigma” finish line we use to define a discovery. The Higgs boson is still missing in action. Nobody has booked their flights to Stockholm just yet.

So what’s with the hullabaloo? Well, the Higgs Boson is vital for our current understanding of how matter and forces work at the fundamental level.

Currently, the equations that so beautifully describe the building blocks of our Universe are spoiled when we try to give particles mass – the property that stops most particles from travelling at the speed of light.

A nifty mathematical trick proposed by Peter Higgs (and others, including some from Imperial College London) some fifty years ago allows us to have massive particles, but there’s a catch: if it really is how nature works, there should be a Higgs boson we can see in our experiments.

Thus even a whiff of it at the Large Hadron Collider’s two giant detectors, CMS and ATLAS, is enough to get even the most unexcitable of scientists excited.

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And to be honest, after Tuesday's teasing glimpses of a Higgs Boson, a lot of us are excited.

We must, however, exercise caution. The results aren’t conclusive. The “bumps” observed in the data are interesting, and will give Higgs fans hope; but they’re still small enough to be the result of some unlucky coincidences.

That both CMS and ATLAS see these bumps in roughly the same place is intriguing, but it just might be that next year’s data tells us that both teams were just as unlucky as each other.

Perhaps, then, the important message is that – as September’s “faster-than-light” neutrino result also showed – scientists are getting more comfortable with making public work that isn’t finished.

This is science in progress. It doesn’t matter where we end up – we’re inviting you to join us on our journey, and we want to let you know how we’re getting on.

So let’s look at this result as what it is – an exciting step forward on the road to a possible discovery. One thing is for sure. We’ll keep you informed.

Dr Tom Whyntie is a Research Assistant on the CMS experiment at Imperial College London. Follow him on Twitter for updates: @twhyntie